Pac-Man, a look back (video)

The Great Works of Software — The Message — Medium: "Pac-Man was created in 1980, written by Toru Iwatani. It’s a small game, running on laughable hardware. But it gave us a shorthand for a specific kind of play—iconographic, silly. The gameplay of Centipede was better, but the story (a gnome that shoots bugs) was vague; the gameplay of Missile Command crawled but the narrative was incredibly bleak. Pac-Man was a chase, a Tom and Jerry cartoon. It presented a perfect inversion where, upon eating a certain kind of dot, the prey became predator. It took over a year to develop, and a great deal of thought went into the player’s psychology, the fact that they would empathize with the yellow circle of Pac-Man.....The mechanics of the game aligned to some primitive reptile-brain sense of narrative. Run eat run eat run eat KILL EAT KILL EAT KILL EAT KILL run eat run eat run. The music burrowed into the mind, so much so that a whole generation can hear the theme music…"


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